Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed during his speech at mid-September’s fourth congress of the International Russophile Movement that “your congress will launch the work of the Institute for the Study and Support of Russophilia autonomous non-profit research organization”. It’s important to differentiate between the political and cultural forms of Russophilia that have often been mistakenly conflated since the rise of the “Non-Russian Pro-Russian” (NRPR) community within the Alt-Media one.
NRPRs have always existed, and most were cultural and political Russophiles, but they became more globally known since the start of the Ukrainian Conflict in spring 2014 after the “EuroMaidan” coup led to Crimea’s reunification with Russia and the then-Ukrainian Civil War in Donbass. The Leftist elements fighting on the rebels’ side in the latter led to more Leftists around the world becoming NRPRs. Islamists of the “Resistance Axis” school then followed them after Russia’s Syrian Operation began in fall 2015.
More recently, many of those who became NRPRs after the start of large-scale phase of the Ukrainian Conflict that began in early 2022 with the special operation are “Third Worldists”, which refers to folks who hate the West and want to destroy it as revenge for what the West did to the Global South in the past. The Leftists, Islamists, and “Third Worldists” that joined the NRPR community in those three phases since 2014 are mostly faux political Russophiles who only like Russia due to its falsely perceived roles.
They respectively believe that its geopolitical challenge to the West is exacerbating the “crisis of capitalism”, its involvement in West Asia in driven by anti-Zionist motives, and its opposition to neo-colonialism means that it desires the destruction of the West. These groups now collectively comprise the majority of NRPRs, especially their top influencers, and the false conflation of Russian policy with their ideological wishful thinking (whether innocently or deliberately) has misled countless people.
Russia’s “soft power supervisors” – which refers to the state representatives that promote these top influencers – tolerate this since they arguably calculate that it’s better for people to support Russia on false premises than to not support it at all. This soft power strategy has been called “Potemkinism”. Its adherents never discreetly nudge those top influencers into recalibrating their takes so that they more accurately reflect Russian policy even if they then constructively critique it according to their ideology.
Senior figures within the Institute for the Study and Support of Russophilia, who’ve proven their cultural and political Russophilia beyond any doubt, could take the lead in correcting these mistakes by discreetly nudging top NRPRs individually as required since Russia’s “soft power supervisors” won’t. They could also conduct large-scale briefings at major Russia-related events like the Multipolarity Forum and partner with Russia’s Global Fact-Checking Network that counts some top NRPR influencers as members.
The immediate goal should be to end top NRPR influencers’ misportrayal of Russian policy, the medium-term one should be to replace the among them with bonafide political Russophiles (who know about and support its actual policies), and the long-term goals should be to promote more cultural Russophilia. The gross imbalance between these forms within the community has stolen the cultural soul of the movement and turned Russophilia into a trendy cause that ideological opportunists piggyback off of.
